Startup Nerds Hope This DJ Nerd Will Make Them Look Cool

Tech has made it effortless to order takeout or get a limo, but social climbing is the same as it ever was: if you give a bunch of historically unglamorous, uncool startup people a bunch of money, they're going to try to make friends with people like this unbearable Manhattan DJ.

This is one of those economic slices of life that's almost engineered to piss you off, and so the New York Times, as it introduces us to Sean Glass, Silicon Alley's new best friend, posts a disclaimer:

Mr. Glass has one of those biographies you want to hate: Raised on Park Avenue, educated at the Dalton School, he is the son of Daniel Glass, the owner of Glassnote Records, whose artists include Mumford & Sons and Phoenix, and is the grandson of Sam Weiss, an early pioneer of disco music.

We do, and we will. Glass is one of those lucky ducks with a vaguely sexy, sexily vague pseudo-job as music promoter, whose existence is conducive to an absurdly obnoxious mise-en-scene like this:

This year, Mr. Glass attended the Summit Series conference, a regular retreat for young entrepreneurs at a former ski resort in Utah. There, he was introduced to Adam Tichauer, the president of Playbutton, a company that manufactures digital-music stickpins designed to be worn like an iPod on your shirt.

Live to network, network to live, and the cogs of our startup economy will keep inviting you to DJ their launch parties and to tell them what to check out on Rdio. Everyone needs a retinue, and it's hard to imagine better entourage material than this guy, halfway between worlds, the perfect proxy for posturing in New York:

Mr. Glass...at 29, has turned himself into the"musical director" for the New York tech community, and stands among a group of insiders who, having seen the Internet's disruptive abilities gut the music business, feel that the moment has arrived to aggressively embrace high-tech in order to create the industry anew.

That's not a "real thing," and it's hard to discern what his "company"—Win Music—exactly does either. Like so many figures on the bicoastal tech scene, Sean Glass seems to be a professional nothing—a party guest, a DJ, a slideshow filler, a friend:

[Alan] Chan, who had just sold Bre.ad to Yahoo, had arranged, in the extravagant manner of the New York City tech world, for the Sugarhill Gang, an '80s-era hip-hop group, to perform [at his birthday]. Equally in keeping with local start-up fashion, he had also arranged for his gathering to be managed musically by the D.J. and independent-record-label owner Sean Glass.

"Sean's been a homey for years," Mr. Chan said as Mr. Glass, in pigtails and gold Nikes, coaxed the crowd toward the dance floor with a remixed Drake track. "Most music people have no real relationship with tech. But Sean's different. He gets tech. He likes it. He really understands our world."

Think Rachel Sklar, but with turntables. The Times has a hard time explaining how Glass fills his hours—"working as a D.J. at hackathons and tech events, he has established a network of relationships in the New York City tech world and its sister sector in Northern California, human hyperlinks that he hopes will lead to downloads and club dates and branding deals with major corporations." But in a way, it couldn't be more right. Who's better to play a party filled with people whose apps have no good reason to exist than a poseur with a fake company and a famous dad?